Photo by Charles Dharapak, Associated Press
Today, CODEPINK activist Desiree Fairooz walked up to Condi Rice during a Congressional hearing and displayed her hands covered in blood. She yelled “War Criminal” as Condi prepared to testify and was immediately dragged out of the room by the police. This triggered a surge in the police, who began arresting everyone in pink. Click here to see the videos, photos, read news stories and read our CODEPINK’s DC House Blog on the day’s events.
Democracy for America is sending around an invitation to vote in its Pulse Poll for your favorite Democratic presidential candidate. If you had to vote today, who would you choose?
Right now, Al Gore is ahead, followed by Obama, Edwards and Kucinich. Clinton is coming in fifth, pulling just 5 percent of the vote.
Add your two cents.
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DFA:
Our challenge to Al Gore: Jump In or Drop Out!
Something surprising is happening at Democracy for America; former Vice President Al Gore is leading the race for the DFA Presidential endorsement – as a write-in candidate.
Voting is still open until November 5 at midnight, and there is plenty of time for any candidate to win. All your candidate needs is your vote right now:
VOTE in DFA’s Pulse Poll
Despite the fact that Al Gore has not announced that he will run and wasn’t even included in the endorsement poll, DFA members have seized the power and written him in. With over 65,000 votes cast so far, the time has come for Vice President Gore to make a decision.
The clock is ticking. We are deep into the 11th hour. There are fewer than 90 days until the first votes are cast. And filing deadlines to be on the ballot start closing in just days.
You deserve to know. Is Al Gore in or out?
Fixing Cocaine Sentencing Laws
By Kara Gotsch
This month the Supreme Court heard a case which touched on a 20-year-old controversy involving justice and crack cocaine. The court will rule early next year in Kimbrough v. United States whether a federal district judge’s more lenient sentencing decision, based on his disagreement with policy that punishes crimes involving crack cocaine more harshly than those involving powder cocaine, is reasonable. The case will help judges determine their ability to sentence below an advisory guideline range. Unfortunately, the outcome will leave in place the excessive mandatory penalties that the Kimbrough judge found unjust.
The case of Derrick Kimbrough stems from his 2005 guilty plea in Virginia for possession with intent to distribute 56 grams of crack cocaine and possession of a firearm. Kimbrough, a Desert Storm veteran with no previous felony convictions, was prosecuted in federal court where penalties involving crack cocaine are harsher than in state systems. As a result, instead of receiving a sentence of about 10 years under Virginia law, he faced a federal sentencing guideline range between 19 and 22 years.
Federal District Judge Raymond A. Jackson, who presided over Kimbrough’s case, called the recommended guideline sentence “ridiculous” and instead sentenced Kimbrough to 15 years, the minimum required by mandatory sentencing laws.
If you caught the story on this blog, or elsewhere, about students at Claflin University being recently told that they couldn’t form a Students for Barack Obama – then getting coerced into participating in a Clinton for President campus rally that pulled them out of class – you are beginning to understand what pundits mean when they talk about the “inevitability” of a Clinton nomination.
The Clinton muscle was flexed at Claflin by Sen. John Matthews (D-Orangeburg), a black legislator who has been in the legislature for 32 years.
It was given another workout at a recent fundraiser for a Columbia-based nonprofit, which charged $50 a head for tickets sold to folks with the expectation of hearing US Rep. Jim Clyburn keynote.
Clyburn, one of the most powerful black men in America, has repeatedly said that he was not going to make a primary endorsement in the Democratic presidential contest. So it was a bit of a surprise to those who turned out for the dinner when it was announced that Clyburn couldn’t make it and that Sen. Hillary Clinton would fill in for him.
Event organizers say they didn’t expect the event to turn into a Clinton rally, but that’s what happened. Rep. John Lewis, arguably one of the most progressive members of Congress, had announced his endorsement of Clinton earlier that day in Atlanta, and was on hand to introduce AME Bishop James, Chairman of the nonprofit. James happened to be the Bishop of Arkansas when Bill Clinton first ran for the White House, was credited with helping deliver the black vote, and has been tight with the Clintons ever since.
James told the crowd that there wasn’t time to recognize all the politicians in the room, “like Senators Ford and Jackson,” so he wouldn’t mention any names. Both Ford and Jackson are on the Clinton campaign payroll. Bishop James then lead the roughly 1,000 assembled guests in a prayer that he had written as a poem. The refrain was, “We had a leader, Lord, and Bill Clinton was his name, and what we need, God, is more of the same.”
Hillary then took the stage and gave a great speech about leading us to the promised land of peace, prosperity and health “coverage” for all. If you didn’t know the back story on all her positions, you would have cheered!
It was an amazing display of the power of the “Clinton machine,” and a lesson on what some interpret as the inevitability of another Clinton presidency (or at least candidacy).
Brett Bursey
Clinton rakes in cash from the weapons industry
by Leonard Doyle
The Independent
The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.
Clinton’s wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts.
Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. “The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed,” said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.
The Real Estate of Women’s Health
By Ann Friedman
In the politics of providing reproductive health care to women, opponents are using three important things as weapons: location, location, location. Which is why health-care providers scored a major victory this month with the opening of a sparkling new $7.5 million clinic this week in Aurora, Illinois.
Abortion may be legal in America, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s available to all American women. For years, right-wing activists have used property law and building codes to make the provision of women’s reproductive care prohibitively burdensome. They’ve successfully passed laws in a number of states that target abortion providers, requiring expensive interior renovations to change air-circulation methods, heighten ceilings, and widen halls and doorways.
Some who oppose abortion have made a practice of buying up the property leased by women’s health clinics, then installing a so-called crisis pregnancy center – where right-wing activists try to guilt women out of having abortions – on the premises. These property grabs are typically made by a third party whose name is unfamiliar to clinic directors, as was famously done in Wichita, Kansas, by Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue. But when Planned Parenthood went to open its new Aurora clinic, opponents cried foul because the reproductive health-care provider built its facility and obtained building permits through a subsidiary, Gemini Office Development, LLC.
America’s Anti-Militarist Tradition
by Sheldon Richman
The right wing went apoplectic at the skepticism that greeted Gen. David Petraeus’s recent testimony about the alleged success of the military escalation in Iraq. It was as though a member of the military was incapable of engaging in spin to support his commander in chief’s war policy. President Bush summed up this attitude revealingly when he said it was one thing to attack him, but quite another to question General Petraeus.
War, Clausewitz noted, is politics by other means. That makes high-ranking generals a species of politician. Not a few have harbored presidential thoughts, and some have made it. It is said that Petraeus would like to be another. These are the people the pro-war conservatives are willing to trust implicitly? (Anti-war members of the armed forces, on the other hand, are, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, “phony soldiers.”)
Hello peacebuilders,
I received a link to this news report today through a list serve with Dept. of Peace State coordinators. I have read the letter, and encourage you to do as well. It is a report of a letter written from Muslim leaders of all the major sects of that religion, to all of our religious leaders in the Christian faith. It shows us that the movement that we are a part of is working, and that there is a thirst for peace among this world’s religions. It brings tears to my eyes and warmth to my heart to know that there are religious leaders taking the time to research and demonstrate the similarities between the Muslim faith and Christianity. The work that you are all doing in your own hearts and communities is not in vain, and we will see a world that knows peace.
Keep up the good work and the faith!
In Pursuit of Peace,
Dee Partridge, Charleston
Joe Erwin, former chair of the SC Democratic Party, is testing the waters for a run against Sen. Lindsey Graham. The waters Joe is testing are of the conservative Republicans who are mad at Lindsey for his earlier thoughtful position on immigration reform. You may already be over Joe for his failure to take a stand against the Republican 2006 GOTV ploy of using homophobia to motivate its base. I told Joe a year before the vote to include discrimination against gays in our state constitution that if he didn’t come out against the amendment, Democratic candidates would be afraid to, and that Dems were going to again let fear trump hope, and lose. He didn’t, and they did.
Or maybe you thought it was a bit off putting that the biggest client of Joe’s ad agency was the predatory lender Advance America at a time when the party platform called for closing them down. If you retained a shred of respect for Joe’s democratic principles, I’m afraid his posturing for a Senate race is going to disappoint you.
In an Oct. 3 interview with right-wing talk show host Michael Gallagher, Joe parroted the xenophobic refrain that Lindsey’s position amounted to “amnesty” for undocumented workers.
Joe led the state Democratic Party during the 2006 elections where Democrats picked up seats nearly everywhere but in SC. Joe’s failed “Republican Lite” strategy didn’t work then (or for the previous 20 years), so he is racheting up the conservative rhetoric to the point where he sounds like Jim DeMint.
Wrong way, Joe. You may lose as a genuine Democrat, but you sure as hell aren’t going to win as a jackass in an elephant suit.
Go to Mike Gallagher Talk Radio to hear Joe’s demented version of Harry Dent’s Southern Strategy.
Brett Bursey